In a recent revelation, a team of researchers at Cornell University have brought an unconventional material into the field of robotics—fungal mycelia found in forests. This groundbreaking approach has presented a new way for controlling 'biohybrid' robots, offering them a higher potential of response to environmental changes in comparison to synthetic robots.
The creation of a robot typically demands intricate technical skills, time, appropriate materials, and in this extraordinary case, a bit of forest fungus. The researchers have tapped into harnessing the inherent electrical signals of fungal mycelia to exert control over their robotic creations and enhance their sensitivity towards environmental interactions.
The key finding of their study, which is published in Science Robotics, posits the usage of fungal entities for environmental sensing and provision of command signals to the robots thereby enhancing their degree of independent functioning.
"By incorporating mycelium into the electronics of a robot, the biohybrid machinery we've developed is capable of sensing and responding to its environment. Although we used light as the input in this research, our future experiments will utilize chemical inputs. The potential outcome for these robots could be to sense soil chemistry, thus facilitating decisions regarding fertilizer utilizations in row crops and potentially reducing harmful impacts of farming, for instance, hazardous algal blooms," says Rob Shepherd, the paper's senior author and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University.
Mycelia are the vegetative parts of mushrooms that exist underground. They have the innate capability to sense and react to biological and chemical signals.
The team built two types of biohybrid robots—an arachnid-shaped soft robot and a wheeled robot. These robots underwent three different experiments that tested their reaction to continuous spikes in the mycelia's signal, exposure to ultraviolet light and an overriding of the mycelia's native signal. In all instances, the remarkable adaptations of the mycelia-driven robots were astoundingly evident.
This pioneering research has been supported by multiple organizations, namely, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the NSF Signal in Soil program, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) CROPPS Science and Technology Center.
Disclaimer: The above article was written with the assistance of an AI. The original sources can be found on ScienceDaily.
